Posted by SleepyTimeGal on August 13, 2008 at 09:16:42:In Reply to: Newbie - how bad? what's next? posted by jammies on August 12, 2008 at 21:35:00:
The thing is, your body is under multiple assaults (allergies, diabetes, sleep apnea, oxygen desaturation, to mention a few), and tinkering with moderate fixes is not going to relieve the physical stressors enough to allow your body to really heal. Untreated sleep apnea only worsens over time which, in turn, makes everything else worse. Sleeping blood oxygen is never supposed to go below 90%. You don't say whether you got to Stage 3-4 sleep which is where much of our healing takes place.
Desensitizing shots are good, but you also need to get adequate sleep in order for everything to start working better. I also have severe allergies (yes, I had the shots; two courses) and mild asthma and found that a nasal mask, along with heated humidifier on the CPAP, has been most comfortable and made me a nose-breather after a lifetime of breathing through my mouth. I tried the full face mask in the beginning and it just didn't work, was leaky and noisy, very uncomfortable. It lasted about two weeks. But it might work for you; masks are very individual things.
I would urge you to press for an auto-adjusting CPAP with the software so you can download your nightly stats to your computer. My sleep apnea was very bad by the time it was diagnosed and my advice is to get the CPAP, use it faithfully, and do whatever else needs doing to build good health (exercise, good diet, good sleep, good attitudes). Prevention can be far more effective than working to rebuild from a severely deteriorated status.
- Re: Newbie - how bad? what's next? Barb (Seattle) 06:44 8/15/08 (0)